No support for Sembawang Proposal

Sep 3, 2012

Statistics never lie but statisticians often do is ringing in my ears as a reminder of my first introduction to statistics.My Canadian teacher gave us a great introduction to the subject.A few years on (quite a few) from that after teaching statistics and 10 different IT subjects at Griffith University including eCommerce, eBusiness and User Interface Design I am in a good position to analyse false claims pushed by web statistics.

"Community consultation on the project closed last week, with reports indicating overwhelming support.

The project's website had more than 45,000 hits since launching."

Spectacular FailureGuess what - this actually indicates a spectacular failure.Imagine investing in full page ads with editorial after editorial spruiking your development to only scrape up 2,000 visitors (possibly less)

They are using Google Analytics on the site so there is no excuse for not having the correct information to inform us of just how unpopular the site was.Google Analytics measures each visit and allows you to view a presentation of these figures - they have chosen to display a meaningless figure of hits.Without revealing our numbers we can assure readers that the www.SaveOurSpit.com gets considerably more 'hits' on a monthly basis than the "overwhelming support" claimed in the article above.

Hit is not a visitorIn website statistics a hit is not a visitor - depending on the website the figure can be a very inflated way of making something look more.On some sites there will be 60 hits per visitor or more - hence website owners often quote their hits when trying to make a site look popular.The reason is everything on a web page is actually a hit - so if one page had 5 images there is 5 hits to start with.Hence the figure is useless - its the unique visitors that is important coupled with the bounce rate and a few other useful figures that are used by SEO's Search Engine Optimisation company's to analyse and improve websites.Look at the image (left column) to see how one website with 3,334 unique visitors in a month also reported 240,483 hits - this is a website that sells surfboard fins www.finshop.com.au.Hence we are delighted to hear just how poorly your site and proposal is being accepted by the public over the months since launching.

In fact if you went to Google and typed in "Wavebreak Island Proposal" the first result is the GCB and the second result is www.SaveOurSpit.com (as of writing)Hence the proponents are not generating much in the way of natural traffic even on the most logical keyterms - another spectacular failure.We often see quite poor strategies - by what are supposed to be companies spruiking for us to hand over our public open space. They spend much of their resources influencing politicians and treat the public like fools.

Sembawang's own survey was boycotted by many Save Our Spit supporters at our request as it was using leading questions and asking for people's details.

We now know that their website has been a disaster and that the 2,000 odd visitors they have had represent a fraction of what we get in genuine community support across our Facebook Page the website and our youtube channel.Not to mention our growing number of stickers on cars

SOSA can only hope that given this apparently demonstrated lack of community support - there is no way a Newman government is going to risk generations of voter backlash by giving away our public open space.